Forbidden Technology

Robert Temple reveals important ancient artifacts which are not allowed to exist.

Technology
is forbidden when it is not allowed to exist. It is easy to forbid technology
to exist in the past because all you have to do is to deny it. Enforcing
the ban then becomes a simple matter of remaining deaf, dumb, and blind.
And most of us have no trouble in doing that when necessary.

I have discovered an avalanche of evidence proving the existence of a
very remarkable ancient technology, one which is well and truly forbidden
because it indicates that our ancestors were not idiots, and as we all
know very well, if we ever admitted that, the illusion of progress would
be seriously imperiled.

The technology I have discovered is optical. I have found in museums all
over the world, more than 450 ancient optical artefacts, most of them
lenses, but in any case, magnifying aids.

These ancient lenses generally magnify about 1.5 or 2 times. Heinrich
Schliemann, the 19th century discoverer of Troy, excavated 48 rock crystal
lenses at Troy. This is one of the largest hoards of ancient lenses ever
found. These were unfortunately lost for many decades because they were
with the missing Trojan gold hoard which disappeared from the Berlin Museum
at the end of the Second World War. In recent years the Russians have
admitted that the Red Army stole the gold and it is all in Moscow today.
The 48 lenses are with these gold artefacts.

Another large number of crystal lenses exists in Crete, mostly found at
Knossos. And yet another hoard exists at Ephesus, in Turkey, though those
ones are very unusual because they are concave lenses used to correct
for myopia (shortsightedness), some shrinking images by as much as 75%.
Most ancient lenses are convex and were used to magnify. At Carthage there
are 14 glass lenses and two of rock crystal stored in a drawer in the
museum; they have apparently never been displayed. Egypt too has examples
one pair of glass lenses was excavated from the wrappings of a mummy and
obviously were used as spectacles except that loops around the ears for
modernstyle spectacles seem not to have been invented in ancient times.
So these may have had some kind of nose loop or may have been held as
a lorgnette.

The
oldest evidence of a sophisticated optical capability which I have found
goes back as far as 3300 BC. An ivory knife handle was excavated in the
1990s from a predynastic grave of that date at Abydos in Egypt. It belonged
to a king. It bears microscopic carvings which could only have been made
with, and can only be seen with, a magnifying glass.

The oldest actual lenses which I have found are from the 4th and 5th Dynasties
of ancient Egypt and date to perhaps 2500 BC. These are perfectly ground
and polished convex crystal lenses which are used as eyes in statues of
that date. One such statue is in the Louvre, in Paris, but the rest are
in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
There are many ancient classical texts which specifically describe both
magnification and works produced under magnification by craftsmen. For
instance, the Roman author Seneca speaks of magnification, and Cicero,
Pliny and others described microscopic works of art. I have gathered together
all of these texts in my book, The Crystal Sun. It is from Cicero's description
of a miniature version of the Iliad so small that it could fit inside
a walnut shell that our modern expression, 'in
a nutshell', came into use, passed on by Shakespeare's Hamlet into modern
usage.

I
even own an ancient lens myself which I was able to purchase. from a friend
who collected ancient objects. He had no idea that it was a lens, but
he bought it because it had an archaic Greek carving of a flying figure
on it. In fact, that wonderful carving in no way interferes with the magnifying
properties of the lens, since it is transparent. It was probably added
to the lens at a later date in its history, but it offers a convenient
way to provide a minimum date for the object.

I took it along to the Greek and Roman Antiquities Department of the British
Museum for a dating of the carving. I was told there that the object was
a `fake' because it was made of glass. After much prodding, I got the
,expert' to say that if the object had been crystal, the carving would
date from the 6th or 7th century BC. Of course, I didn't believe for a
minute that the object was glass, so I took it to the Natural History
Museum for an X-ray diffraction analysis. This proved that the object
was rock crystal, and hence genuine. The interesting part of the comment
by the British Museum expert who insisted my lens was a fake was: `they
didn't make these then, it can't be real'.

No, none of this can be real.

At the end of this article is a photo I took of a painting of an ancient
Greek of the 5th century BC using a telescope. This painting is from a
pot excavated at the Acropolis about twenty years ago. The pot fragment
has been on display in the Acropolis Museum at Athens for many years,
where no one appears to have 'seen' it. Many ancient lenses are on display
in museums around the world, falsely labelled of course as counters',
buttons', 'gems' and so on, and no one sees' them either.

What is the answer to this? I call it consensus blindness. People agree
not to see what they are convinced cannot exist. 'Everyone knows' that
there was no optical technology in antiquity, so consequently when you
come across its, staring
you in the face, you go blind. End of conflict.

In fact, optical technology in antiquity sometimes reached extraordinary
heights. The Layard Lens in the British Museum dates to the 8th century
BC and was excavated in the throne room of the Assyrian King Sargon II's
palace in what is today called Iraq. I have carried out a full technical
analysis of this lens. I have been able to demonstrate that this rock
crystal lens, now cracked and considerably damaged, was originally a perfect
convex lens with a flat ('plane') base, which was ground in a special
way known to opticians as 'toroidal', - a technique only available for
the public since about 1900. Such grinding produces lenses to correct
for individual cases of astigmatism. It would be possible to go out into
the street today and find someone whose astigmatism was perfectly corrected
by the Layard Lens. It was clearly used as a monocle. It perfectly fits
the eye aperture, as we can see in the illustration. It is most extraordinary
that such a high technology existed in the 8th century BC. And not a single
Assyriologist has acknowledged the publication of my study of this important
object except for the one who encouraged me in the first place; he was
curious as to what the results would be. So it appears that the community
of Assyriologists find it convenient not to 'see' my book.
Another
example of optical technology being taken to extraordinary lengths I found
in Sweden. The Eastern Vikings had a very extensive crystal lens industry.
More than a hundred lenses survive in Sweden and the surrounding countries.
None, however, are known from Norway; the Western Vikings were apparently
not let in on the secret.

The Scandinavian archaeologists were delighted at my findings, and they
have translated some of my work into Swedish and published it already
in a leading archaeological journal there. They had no reason to be blind'
because they loved the' fact that I could show that their Vikings were
even more interesting than they already thought. I discovered that the
Vikings had a microscopic optical industry: they were grinding and polishing
lenses the size of rain drops which could magnify three times. This is
an astonishing feat and one would marvel at it even today.

There are many old British lenses as well. I found two collections of
them stored in geology collections. Some of them are extraordinarily clever,
and have projecting
points at the back which I termed resting points', to enable them to be
use by craftsmen for magnifying while keeping both hands free; the point
does not interfere with the magnifying properties. A similarly ingenious
design was produced at Troy, where one crystal lens was perforated with
a central hole, through which the craftsman could insert his carving tool,
while the magnification all around was undisturbed.

Ancient telescopes were not a difficult invention once they had the lenses.
All you have to do is to hold up a lens in each hand and look through
them both at once: thus you have a rudimentary telescope. Even though
the image is inverted - it takes a third lens to flip it right way up
- this makes no difference if you are, for instance, studying the surface
of the moon or looking at the stars. No one can tell if a star is right
way up or upside down - it all looks the same. In The Crystal Sun I suggest
that primitive telescopes were used in ancient Britain and that Stonehenge
was an observatory. I suggest that the outer trilithons may have acted
as a base for a perishable dome of wood or wattle, and that the inner
trilithons, which are higher, were to serve as the base for a perishable
wooden observation platform facing east, for the observation of lunar
risings.